Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death,... a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If it is no exaggeration to say that Deerfield is not so much a town as the ghost of a town, its dimness almost transparent, its q...uiet almost a cessation, it is essential to add that it is probably quite the most beautiful ghost of its kind, and with the deepest poetic and historic significance to be found in America.... It is, and will probably always remain, the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another. And the wonderful ghostliness of this mile-long 'Street' of grave and ancient houses, the strange air of unreality which hangs over it, arises precisely from the fact that the little town is really saying two things at once. It is saying, 'I dared to be beautiful, even in the shadow of the wilderness'; but it is also saying, 'And the wilderness haunts me, the ghosts of a slain race are in my doorways and clapboards, like a kind of death.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... we, like so many others who think more of working than of dying, care only to push on steadily, wishing less for cessation of ...toil than for strength to keep at it; and for wisdom to make it worthy of the ideal of labor and of life which we believe to be the most precious gift of Heaven to any soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

With these I would be.And with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation,...The waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneousdriftwood,Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrentsThe tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,The tongues of water, creeping in, quietly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »